condition (record/cover): NM / EX- Insert included. |  Goffredo Petrassi's only comic opera - and one of the most unlikely pairings in twentieth-century Italian music: the composer of Coro di morti and the eight Concerti per orchestra, a figure of austere expressive control, setting a bawdy Cervantes farce in a translation by Eugenio Montale. Il Cordovano, composed 1944-48 and premiered at La Scala on 12 May 1949, is an opera in one act drawn from the entremés "El viejo celoso" (1615): the young Donna Lorenza, trapped in marriage to the jealous old Cannizares, enlists her neighbour Hortigosa to smuggle a lover into the house hidden behind a cordovan tapestry. The plot is pure commedia - basin of water to the face, young man spirited out the back door - but Petrassi's score treats it with the same contrapuntal density and timbral precision he brought to his concert works, creating something genuinely strange: a farce of metallic transparency, where comic vocal writing borders on parodistic imitation of speech.

The Montale connection is worth underlining. Italy's greatest twentieth-century poet providing the libretto for its most formally rigorous composer: two artists who shared a temperament of compressed intensity, irony held under pressure, and a fundamental suspicion of easy eloquence. Montale's Italian doesn't simply translate Cervantes - it sharpens the text into something drier, closer to the bone. Among Petrassi's students were Franco Donatoni, Aldo Clementi, Cornelius Cardew, Ennio Morricone, and Peter Maxwell Davies - a list that suggests how central his teaching was to European composition, even as his own works, and this opera in particular, remain scandalously under-recorded.

LP. Ricordi CRM 1005, 1987. Published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni. Photography by Roberto Masotti.